Our PA Mitchel, it turns out, is very good at decorating christmas trees. We put ours up yesterday. Cynics that Lyn and I both are, neither of us were that bothered about putting it up, but yesterday the kid in me kicked in and I decided to get the halls decked. I’d asked Dom to get our plastic tree out of the loft the night before, and yesterday we got our front room looking festive. I even tried to sing ”Deck the Halls” until everyone asked me to please stop. It’s odd when I come to think about it, though: I know Christmas is a huge capitalist scam; christ, if he existed at all, probably never erected an evergreen in his front room. Hell, he probably never had a front room, and I don’t believe in him anyway. And yet, yesterday, part of me felt compelled to get ours put up in the corner of our front room. Things didn’t feel quite right without the green plastic and tinsel monstrosity there. I suppose it just goes to show, I’m still a big kid at heart; either that or I’m not as unentangled from capitalist consumer culture as I’d like to believe I am.